Teamwork limits

[Furret]

One thing that bugged me about PS was the inability to color-coordinate more than 30 players. What if I'm teh c00lest nerd ever and i have fourty friends and we all want to play together. You can only fit thirty people in your platoon, and the rest just look like greenies. I always thought you could have one more level of organization, say a brigade (five platoons).

It wouldn't be practical with modern-day planetside, but back in the day, the big outfits could field a brigade, and you'd probably have organized half the population on a continent. Imagine if an entire outfit organized two brigades and pop locked a continent.

Anyway, got off topic there with my wet, err, daydreams.

Obviously you could still communicate on TS or Vent, even if they weren't in your platoon, but you could do the same thing with nobody in a platoon.

Just me hoping that you can organize more troops that show up colorfully on the map (and hopefully share experience )

[Bags]

I thought they said platoons would be a lot bigger. Don't remember the specifics.

[FIREk]

I think they bumped it up to 40, which is nice, big and manageable. Coordination between platoons was said to also be possible.
I only wish a Battlefield-series game let me play with more than 3 friends...

[Zulthus]

Originally Posted by FIREk

I only wish a Battlefield-series game let me play with more than 3 friends...

Stop playin' Bad Company and get on to the real games, Battlefield 2 and soon BF3. 6+ player squads ftw..

[Malorn]

Also with a class system you can start tagging players with icons and/or colors to indicate class. Helps in management of larger numbers of troops. Nice little takeaway we can get from the MMORPG genre.

[FIREk]

Originally Posted by Zulthus

Stop playin' Bad Company and get on to the real games, Battlefield 2 and soon BF3. 6+ player squads ftw..

I haven't played BC2 in ages, I'm waiting for BC3. Were there 6-person squads in that old Desert Combat clone, though? I don't recall there being larger squads in BF2 back when I played it...

Nevermind... Squad size in BF3 seems to have been confirmed as 4 on all platforms...
http://www.gamepur.com/news/4147-ea-...ad-size-4.html

[Aractain]

4 is all you need. If your playing a classic RPG.

[Senyu]

I hope they have some nice in game voice chat. And easy control to speak to your platoon or just as easily speak only to squad leaders. Easier to manage when speaking only to those you want to talk to

[CutterJohn]

I see no reason their names wouldn't be highlighted, along with their position on the map, but I see no real reason to have everyone listed up on screen.. That always rather annoyed me. I think it was a vestigial holdover from mmorpgs that had no use in an fps.

[FastAndFree]

Originally Posted by CutterJohn

I see no reason their names wouldn't be highlighted, along with their position on the map, but I see no real reason to have everyone listed up on screen.. That always rather annoyed me. I think it was a vestigial holdover from mmorpgs that had no use in an fps.

It shows you at a glance how battered the paltoon is (but only for infantry, that always bothered me)
I would like it if it showed what "class" people are, and if they are in a vehicle then the type, position occupied and status of the vehicle too. Although I have no idea how cluttered the squad bars would get with all this information (and how confusing it would look with the crews of multiperson vehicles possibly scattered all over the platoon)

Slightly related idea, I hope that this time around Outfit members who are not in your platoon will be a marked with a different color as well. (Although with increased platoon size and connected paltoons this might not be that important)

[basti]

Originally Posted by Furret

One thing that bugged me about PS was the inability to color-coordinate more than 30 players. What if I'm teh c00lest nerd ever and i have fourty friends and we all want to play together. You can only fit thirty people in your platoon, and the rest just look like greenies. I always thought you could have one more level of organization, say a brigade (five platoons).

It wouldn't be practical with modern-day planetside, but back in the day, the big outfits could field a brigade, and you'd probably have organized half the population on a continent. Imagine if an entire outfit organized two brigades and pop locked a continent.

Anyway, got off topic there with my wet, err, daydreams.

Obviously you could still communicate on TS or Vent, even if they weren't in your platoon, but you could do the same thing with nobody in a platoon.

Just me hoping that you can organize more troops that show up colorfully on the map (and hopefully share experience )

Okay, first of all, it seems to be bigger this time, at least 40 per platoon.

Next thing, and much more important: You cant manage more than 30 guys anyway. And im talking about proper leadership, means you take care of getting a transport, having enough Meds/Engis/Grunts/Maxes/bla, where to drop, what to do, leading them to the destination, keeping them together, etc etc etc. The list is long, its alot to do, and i figured that even with a skilled team of guys, keeping 30 together is quite a challenge, 40 may just overdo it.
Now, what you could do, and what people always did since the early days: Get someone else capable of leading a platoon, fit the rest of the guys into a different platoon and a different Teamspeak (or whatever) channel, use channel commander to communicate with the leaders. Bang, you got 60+ guys working together, nothing can stop you now.

An ingame way to see where that other platoon is would be neat, but wont be of any actual use. At least i dont see any use, it always worked the ways we did things.

[RedKnights]

Originally Posted by basti

Next thing, and much more important: You cant manage more than 30 guys anyway.

An ingame way to see where that other platoon is would be neat, but wont be of any actual use. At least i dont see any use, it always worked the ways we did things.

There's a lot of use for it for the bigger outfits, like Furret said, the larger ones back in the day like mine could easily fill up 2.5-3 Platoons of guys, and we still on a weekly basis coordinate about 1.5-2. It is a challenge to coordinate 30-40 guys but with a Voice-Com infrastructure and training it's not really that hard, it just requires competence.

So I suppose my point is, I love bigger platoons, and i'd really like a way to see the position of another platoon on the map so that our Drop-ship guys can see the positions of our air force and armored column, rather than having to relay positional updates via voice-coms.

As to cross-platoon exp share, that would be silly, because you'd have large platoons existing for no other reason than to sponge up EXP during a zerg fight.

[SgtMAD]

Originally Posted by basti

Okay, first of all, it seems to be bigger this time, at least 40 per platoon.

Next thing, and much more important: You cant manage more than 30 guys anyway. And im talking about proper leadership, means you take care of getting a transport, having enough Meds/Engis/Grunts/Maxes/bla, where to drop, what to do, leading them to the destination, keeping them together, etc etc etc. The list is long, its alot to do, and i figured that even with a skilled team of guys, keeping 30 together is quite a challenge, 40 may just overdo it.
Now, what you could do, and what people always did since the early days: Get someone else capable of leading a platoon, fit the rest of the guys into a different platoon and a different Teamspeak (or whatever) channel, use channel commander to communicate with the leaders. Bang, you got 60+ guys working together, nothing can stop you now.

An ingame way to see where that other platoon is would be neat, but wont be of any actual use. At least i dont see any use, it always worked the ways we did things.

running more than 30 ppl is easy if you have them all trained up and they know their jobs,Ht did it for years.

On Markov we used to get whole poplocks on TS during the events SOE would run, Cogburn and I would run the big picture and have PL's set up to run their toons,we never lost an event and the NC ran just like that until the CN showed up and ruined the cohesiveness that had been the way things had been done for years because they didn't know the language and didn't have a clue about tactics and strats.

if your players are trained up properly at the squad level then you can keep scaling up your outfit but it all starts at the squad level.

what i love about PS2 is all the work required to find,train and retain all those ppl has already been done so we can hit the ground running on day one of release,I have has over a hundred guys contact me or come back to the Ht forums and report in, ready to play when the game is released

one other thing,command structure is pretty important,if the PL leader is having to micro manage everything his squads are doing then you have already lost the fight,your ppl should trained up so they know what is expected and when it is expected so you don't have to waste time babysitting and if you can't get ppl trained up then maybe its time to either quit leading or start kicking ppl.

I have been a construction superintendent,foreman or lead man for over thirty years,I also ran the floor of a drilling rig for a few years and was an iron worker on some high steel jobs so I have a lot of experience yelling at ppl to get things done and that seems to have paid off in PS

[The Barn Cat]

Originally Posted by Bags

I thought they said platoons would be a lot bigger. Don't remember the specifics.

"i think he said something like that maybe"

[Lonehunter]

I think platoon sizes will increase a bit, and I hope we stay with the same color coordination between squads adding another color if 4 squads.

Since they've mentioned alliances between outfits, we better have options to ally as Platoons to make a Company or Brigade. Now if I'm in Platoon 1 I see the standard colors for my squad, but other squads/platoons in the Brigade I see as Turquoise, no need to throw in every color of the rainbow just for squading.

Originally Posted by basti

You cant manage more than 30 guys anyway.

I'm guessing you weren't around the first few years of PS, if you where you sure missed some massive coordination.